Archive for the ‘Sales’ Category

This week I started thinking about team work after watching my son play basketball for his district team.

When I was watching my son I reflected on how much they had travelled to become a team in a really short timeframe. My boy is just 10 years old and his team were getting beaten comprehensively. But the boys didn’t give up. They tried new routines and kept persevering, eventually getting a basket and scoring. While the end score was a thrashing 66-8 the boys grew as a team and all improved and helped each other out.

Similarly in my team at work we have helped each other out in achieving our sales targets this year, even though it has been within a very hard ecomonic environment.

Katzenbach and Smith in ‘The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization’ (1992) investigate the lifecycle of a team. In analysis of this model I have compared the model and Sam’s basketball team:

The more a team moves towards high performance means that the team’s performance will increase as will their effectiveness. I have seen this in my son’s team over the summer and I can also see it in my work team since we formed. This is why it is so important that we reach high performance as it will impact on our sales result. The Team model follows (1992, p.17):

What resonated with me was that a real team works together to achieve the performance required. The high performance team takes this one step further, not only does a team of this calibre achieve the task, its output is better and that the team earns more success and growth as a result.

I am going to use my new knowledge on high performing teams to ensure that we all have personal growth and contribute to collective success of the budget achievement.

In my current position I manage 22 Retail Shops, an 80 seat Contact Centre, a direct B2C sales force and a web sales team. My teams sell insurance, security, travel, automotive products and merchandise for the entire Group. To have such as diverse multi-skilled sales force you really need a system to drive the performance of the team and to hold managers accountable. To enable the teams to be effective in 2006 I introduced the Friedman Gold Stars sales system.

The system is very simple, it is a process to engage with the customer, in essence to become their friend, so that you can match your products and services to their needs to save them time and money. Then to measure the effectiveness a simple red dots for under budget achievement, green dots for getting budget and gold stars for over budget performance helps keep the staff motivated towards success. For managers it is about understanding that you need to keep your people free and clear to sell with little distractions and to coach this behaviour, similar to Greenleaf’s servant leadership.

For sales people the 8 steps to sales success are:

1. Precheck – making sure that you are ready to sell & that the store is presentable

2. Opening the Sale:
• Acknowledge every customer
• 180 degree Walk Pass – this is acknowledging the customer, but walking past them rather than approaching asking ‘can I help you’ which always gets a ‘no,
just browsing’
• Non-business related opening – breaking the ice to build rapport, as simple as saying ‘that’s a nice watch you have, where did you buy it?’
• Moving into business – saying ‘so, what brings you into the store today?’

3. Probing – finding out about the customer & their needs to match a product

4. Demonstration – selling the value that the customer wants

5. Trial Close – getting the sale by adding on another product

6. Handling Objections – investigating what is the issue, working through any price objection and using the objection to close the sale

The main attribute of a Key Account Manager is to be the intermediary between the organisation and the customer, focussing on finding solutions for the customer and building long term relationships. Other capabilities are:

• The ability to find solutions and match needs with outcomes, whether the outcomes be a product (sale), advice, support or connecting the customer with experts.
• Investigating ways of ensuring that the customer gets the best deal and identifying ways of reducing their costs while increasing their profit.
• Multi-tasking to manage several large customers simultaneously.
• A deep understanding of the products, services and solutions sold by the company.
• A deep understanding of the each of the customer’s businesses, needs, attitudes and response times required.
• The ability to build long term relationships through exceptional customer service while demonstrating a genuine concern for the customers wants and needs.
• The willingness to go beyond the call of duty to service, manage and offer solutions to their valued customers.
• The ability to make immediate decisions on their own to overcome customers’ problems.
• Challenging the company’s procedures and policies to ensure that the customer is at the centre of all activity.

The outcome of doing all of the above will be to generate more sales for the business.